Introduction to Sub-tasks

Sub-tasks in Shortcut help you break down user Stories into pieces of work for your team to execute on. Much like a Story, you can estimate, connect to VCS, and move Sub-tasks across your team's workflow.

Assign Sub-tasks to your teammates and view progress of Stories across Shortcut views. This is a new feature in Shortcut, and we would love to hear your feedback. Please let us know what you think by reaching out to our team or sharing in our community slack channel #product-feedback.

💡 Shortcut's Legacy Task feature has been deprecated. Questions on how to transition to Sub-tasks? Review this Help Center Article, or reach out to support@shortcut.com

Enable/Disable Sub-tasks

You can turn on Sub-tasks in your workspace by going to Settings>Features. Turning off Sub-tasks will remove the feature from the UI, however, any Sub-tasks that were created in your workspace before disabling will still be visible, as individual Stories. 

Create Sub-tasks in Stories

Sub-tasks created in a Parent Story will inherit the Epic and Team fields (additional inherited fields are in development for the GA release). Click into Sub-tasks to edit them and add a description.

Another option is to use the "Add from..." action to convert an existing Story into a Sub-task of the Parent Story.

Checklists

Tasks (a legacy feature) are now Checklists! If you need to create a to-do list in a Story, you can utilize the Checklist option. For your descriptions, you can also add a Markdown checklist. Checklist items support markdown formatting and @-mentions. 

Need to explicitly assign an item to another teammate? While you can @-mention a teammate on a Checklist item and it will show on their My Work page > My Checklists list, Checklist items can also be converted to Sub-tasks via the three-dot menu. 

Owners assigned to a Legacy Task item will still retain Ownership of the Checklist item created from that Task. And though not specifically visible on the Checklist item itself, that assigned Checklist item will show on their My Work page > My Checklists list.

Sub-Tasks in Breadcrumbs

Use the breadcrumbs on a Sub-task to view other related Sub-tasks (with the same parent Story), or navigate back to the parent Story.

Convert a Sub-task to a Story

Detaching a Sub-task from a parent Story will make it a standalone Story. You can also delete Sub-tasks directly via the three-dot action menu.

View Sub-tasks on the Stories Page

Parent Stories and any Sub-tasks in the filtered view show up on the Stories Page and detail pages in Shortcut. Filter on Sub-tasks using the filter system on the Stories page, or choose to quickly "Hide Sub-tasks" from the view. Visual indicators distinguish Sub-tasks and Parents from regular Stories.

Filter Sub-tasks on the Stories Page

You can filter on Sub-tasks on the Stories page in Kanban and Table Views using our filtering system. You can also quickly "Hide Sub-tasks" in all views. This filter is persisted in the URL like other filters.

Reports 

Sub-tasks and Stories contribute individually to reporting across all reporting views. This applies for Story count and estimates. For example, if a parent Story has an estimate of 1 and it's Sub-tasks has an estimate total of 3, the total points calculated is 4. 

Automations

Parent Stories (Stories with Sub-tasks) are automatically moved to your team's workflow's first started and done states based on the status of its Sub-tasks. This Automation can be turned off in Settings>Automations.

💡 We are working on more functionality to view and manage Sub-tasks across Shortcut, and would love to hear your feedback on this new feature! Please reach out to us support@shortcut.com

Updated September 23, 2025 17:23